Formula 1 Hero Gilles Villeneuve’s Ferrari Crosses the Auction Block
A gift from Enzo Ferrari, it signified the beginning of an incredible — but tragically short — career.
There’s an inextricable link between Ferrari’s Formula 1 racing efforts and their road cars. At least, that’s what they’d like you to believe. Legend has it that Enzo Ferrari despised building road cars in the first place, but he understood it as a necessary evil to fund the company’s racing efforts.
Regardless of how skeptical you may feel about the actual amount of Formula 1 DNA in any given Ferrari sports car, this particular Ferrari 308 is a bona-fide piece of Formula 1 history. Enzo Ferrari gave this car to Ferrari Formula 1 driver Gilles Villeneuve when he joined the team at the end of the 1977 season. How’s that for a signing bonus?
For fans of Formula 1 racing in the 1970s, Gilles Villeneuve needs no introduction. In fact, for fans of the film Rush, there’s some interesting connections. Villeneuve scored a five-race deal with James Hunt‘s team McLaren after beating — and subsequently impressing — Hunt in a Formula Atlantic race.
At the end of the 1977 season, with two races left, Niki Lauda already had the Driver’s Championship in the bag, so he opted to sit out the final two races of the season. He had been planning on leaving Ferrari at the end of the season anyway, and his early departure gave Villeneuve a chance to prove himself.
Despite a rough start to his career with Ferrari filled with crashes and mechanical failures, 1979 was the beginning of better things for Villeneuve, collecting three of his six career wins in that season alone. Unfortunately, his untimely death at the Belgian Grand Prix in 1982 meant that we would never see the very best of what Villeneuve was capable of.
This 1978 Ferrari 308 will be offered at RM Sotheby’s Monaco sale on May 12. In Quebec, Canada, there is a small museum dedicated to Villeneuve, the local boy who made good. Nothing would make us happier than to see his Ferrari share a home with Villeneuve’s other cars.
Villeneuve and his cars are also the focus of Italy’s Skira Editore’s Wow Gilles!, a fantastic — and long overdue — new coffee table book that chronicles the career of the late legendary Formula 1 driver. The book comes approximately 35 years after his tragic death on Belgium’s Zolder race track in 1982 and traces five years of his short but stellar racing career that began when he made his F1 debut in 1977.
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